Paige Austin has interesting work, a stable marriage, and a circle of women friends that help soothe the ache where life has left empty spots: the place in her heart that her beloved father held, and the one she would have filled with the child she can't conceive. Hers is a world that seems to rotate agreeably on its axis - until her husband's son, Malachi MacGowan, walks into it.
Suddenly, Paige is watching herself spin in a brand new direction as she begins to lose sight of everything she'd thought she was about. Thrown out of boarding school, Mal is the reprobate stepson Paige hardly knows who has come to live with her and his father in their Manhattan apartment. Paige's friends proffer effusive counsel on stepmotherhood, but nothing prepares her for Mal himself. An impossibly tall, smart-talking young man, he makes her feel certifiably old - and yet edgily, wonderfully alive.
In a few electric days, Mal and Paige seem to be forging a connection neither of them can fully fathom. She is no longer childless, and Mal basks in a love unprecedented in his fifteen years. Then, as abrubtly as he arrived, he stalks away - into an existence defined by friends and activities Paige can only imagine. Left with an unraveling marriage and a wounded heart, she attempts her own kind of escape.
